Ryan DeJonghe - The Avid Reader

After reading the first chapter, I was having flashbacks of Dr. Sears’s attachment parenting techniques: wrapping my kids in slings and keeping them bound to my body for 24 hours a day. I understand the sentimentality of comparing our kids to the lovely ladies in Africa and even the cuddly rats. Cute, okay, got it. I haven’t read Dobson’s other books, so I’ll reserve judgment on her theories until I’ve read them.

The preceding chapters contain the real meat of this wonderful book, as the title suggests: over 500 ideas to kick-start your children’s learning. I would like to emphasize this is an excellent book to have for both homeschooling and non-homeschooling families alike. There is no reason that some of these activities can’t be done on weekends, holidays, and nights. Life is learning, and this book will cultivate ideas to find those lessons.

Besides the cut-and-dry ideas, there are many other listed resources on learning. Everything may be online somewhere, but it would take a very long time to swim through the slush and find the gold. This book does it for you. Think of it like a recipe book that has gathered all the online 5-star recipes and bound them together. And as with recipes, there will be some that don’t appeal to you; though I am confident there will be many more that do.

As far as a rating, I find it hard to give any stars on its literary merit, because it isn’t a traditional read through cover-to-cover type of book. This rating also does not reflect Dobson’s theories on homeschooling. I do however give five stars on the sheer amount of content and the organization involved.